25 JULY 1987, Page 28

BOOKS

Some of the mud sticks

Colin Welch

PASSCHENDAELE: THE STORY BEHIND THE TRAGIC VICTORY OF 1917 by Philip Warner It might be possible, particularly for those more expert than I, to find faults in Philip (`Plum' to his friends) Warner's new book, the latest of 40 from his prodigiously productive pen. Even I can doubt whether it was the Kaiser who referred to the treaty guaranteeing Belgium's neutrality as 'a scrap of paper'. Wasn't it Bethmann Ho11- weg? I doubt too whether Schlieffen had `predecessors' called 'Helmuth and Molt- ke'. I know of Helmuth von Moltke the elder, but not of any German general with Helmuth for a surname. I wonder, too, whether the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, murdered at Sarajevo, is aptly described as `a liberal' tout court. I note well that these errors, if such they are, are far away on the periphery of Plum's main proccupations, which are humane and military. As an aid to humility, I also note how nitpickers' luck alone preserved me from a monstrous error of my own. I was about to correct Plum, pompously pointing out that it was Lutyens, not Blomfield, who designed the Menin Gate. The patron saint of nitpickers guided me to the DNB, where I found, what I should have known, that Plum was perfectly right. We are all human. Yet I still wonder — wasn't Old Bill probably not a Cockney but a Brummie? Bruce Bairnsfather was in the Royal Warwicks and his first drawing of Old Bill was on an officers' mess tablecloth preserved at the depot.

As a stylist, too, Plum is not in the class of a Gibbon or Pater or even of the elder Moltke, who wrote beautifully and had much wider interests than Plum's anecdote about him suggests. (He was said to have been shown an exceptionally beautiful view in Austria. He thought for a moment, then said: 'The river is too narrow for an obstacle, and there is insufficient cover for troops'.) Plum's prose is simple and work- manlike. It is occasionally clumsy, very rarely obscure. At its normal best it draws attention to itself as little as a clean window pane. Lacking colour of its own, it faithful- ly transmits the colours of what lies behind it. Hideous indeed they are. The Passchen- daele mud

rose in squashy heaps out of pools and lakes of slimy liquid, which were sometimes black, sometimes yellow from lyddite, sometimes bright green but never the colour that water ought to be.

Plum is here quoting from Major Desmond Allhusen of the 60th Rifles, a man with a sardonic regimental sense of humour akin to his own. Indeed he quotes very exten- sively from the testimony of eye-witnesses, much of it I think unpublished despite its vivid immediacy. From these quotations Sidgwick & Jackson, f13.95 the book takes not only its colour, but its horror, its splendours and miseries, its sense of overwhelming and seemingly inex- orably accumulating tragedy.

On the 20 November Haig decided at last to close down the Passchendaele cam- paign. The official history states, 'It had served its purpose', but few people, according to Plum, 'could see what the purpose had been'. Plum himself is not, I fancy, among those few.

Passchendaele was proclaimed by its initiators to have several purposes, which were at different times emphasised or played down as the ghastly unfolding of the campaign rendered them more or less appropriate. They included: to punch a hole in the German lines through which cavalry could pour; to relieve the French; to capture the ridge which overlooked the Ypres Salient; and to bleed the German army to death. It may have relieved the French; it did capture the ridge, but not for long; it bled our own army as much as the Germans, who could still launch a terrifying offensive next March; the Ger- man line never broke.

Plum's view is, I think, the one that has long been conventional — that Passchen- daele was butchery either purposeless or in pursuit of purposes unattainable or unten- able, ordained by smart, well-fed, unim- aginative generals who never went near the front line and had no idea what was going on up there. One of them, Kiggell, Haig's Chief of Staff, is notoriously reported to have wept when he eventually reached the mere edge of the battlefield, exclaiming, `Did we really send men to fight in this?'

Plum's case against the generals is mounted with exemplary fairness and with- out character assassination: Haig's person- al kindness and courage are recorded. All the more damning are Plum's quotations from Staff memoirs, which speak of life in the trenches, in places adorned with 'little flower beds', as 'safe and pleasant', if `tedious and dull', neither 'very exciting nor very dangerous' but 'very, very cu- rious'. Yet about 50 miles away, in those curious, tedious trenches, more than half a million British and Germans were lost in the Passchendaele campaign alone. All the more chilling thus is Plum's sarcasm when he records Haig's view of himself as 'on the spot', and when he quotes a Staff officer telling how colleagues, 'fresh from regim- ental work' (`carefree and pleasant') simp- ly 'wilted away under the fierce pressures of work at GHQ'. They'd have wilted faster at Passchendaele, Plum drily com- ments.

In other quarters the rehabilitation of Haig and his generals proceeds apace. Mr John Terraine has been conspicuous among these revisionists. Plum pays just tribute to Mr Terraine's 'encyclopaedic' knowledge of the first world war, and asserts that he (Terraine) has tempered his (Plum's) judgments. This may be so: what were they like before? Yet I fancy Mr Terraine will not find the judgments have been tempered quite enough.

Before taking sides, I must note that the revisionists are all even further from the front line than GHQ was, distanced from that hell not only by miles but by the passage of time, which creates a gap only bridgeable by the most powerful imagina- tions. Agreed, Plum is perforce similarly distanced, but the eye-witnesses he calls were not. They are impossible to brush aside; they command awed respect. Moreover Plum served throughout the second world war and Mr Terraine, unless Who's Who misleads, did not. I am old- fashioned enough to believe that experi- ence of one war enlarges one's understand- ing of previous wars. Some things don't change much — the snafus, for instance, which are far more apparent to the com- manded than to the commanders, and the overall view discernible to commanders but hidden from the commanded.

A proper respect for experience should not lead us to suppose on the other hand that experience of one war necessarily helps to win the next. It undoubtedly helped Monty: his tireless self-display in the second world war was excused for him by his experience in the first where, in the front line, he never saw anyone above the rank of lieutenant-colonel. But knowledge of previous wars certainly didn't, in Plum's view, help Haig. Much of Plum's book is a catalogue of horrors. The effect is cumulative: one dare hardly turn the page for fear of what the next will reveal. Ghastly images haunt me: of reinforcements plucked from venereal disease hospitals; of the incessant rain, the floods and the swamps all contaminated by corpses and gas; of the human arms stick- ing up out of the mud, one regularly touched for luck by troops shambling up to the line; of the pillbox in no-man's-land deep in human bones, the stench so awful that the witness fainted; of fragments of bodies and limbs projecting hideously `as in a pickle'; of the poisoned darts, the slightest wound mortal; of the standing corpses, one German, one British, locked together like statues after they had bayoneted each other. Of the awful Merlin Road, of the Bedfords, about to be re- lieved, 'like ghosts, pale and wild-eyed, with long beards and coated with mud from head to foot'; of the company commander up to his knees in water, teeth chattering, who went out of his mind; of the German officer's helmet, its position 'curious, sunk- en down rather far on the nose', that helmet which, lifted off, revealed a head with no upper half. Somewhere Mr Corelli Barnett makes the point (I quote from memory) that the first war was not so ghastly for private soldiers from the slums as for their weedy, whining officers. After all, conditions in, say, Salford before 1914 were not, in Mr Barnett's view, much better than in the front line. I cannot imagine spectacles such as Plum has recorded (I could quote many, many more) being the norm even in Salford. Neville Cardus's memoirs, for instance, record nothing of the kind; perhaps they were too commonplace. These dreadful images made pacifists of many, but not of Plum. His horrors are interleaved in his pages with proud accounts of unimaginable resolution, hero- ism, comradeship and self-sacrifice, of discipline and devotion to duty beyond belief or praise. It is as if on every other Page a distant bugle sounds, causing eyes to prick and fill with tears of pride as well as of grief. Plum's veneration for our already gravely damaged and now further menaced regimental system is not only stated but obvious in his careful chronicling of the exploits of named regiments: who was where, what they did, what they captured or defended against fearful odds, who won the VC, and for what. These details, inexpressibly moving to anyone who ever served in a regiment in action, are often overlooked by grand strategic historians, but not by Plum, who is tactical as well as strategic. They are to him the very stuff of life, and of death. 'The story behind the tragic victory of 1917' is in fact one to inspire as well as to appal. I thought it was the Duke of Wellington who said that 'tis well war is so terrible or we should grow too fond of it — or words to that effect. The Oxford quotation book does not support me. The Duke, or who- ever it was, might after Passchendaele perhaps have adjusted his melancholy if oddly illogical dictum (illogical, surely, in that, if war were not terrible, why should we not grow fond of it?). He might have said that 'tis terrible that war is so terrible, because we shall grow too scared of it. From the poisoned mud of Passchendaele sprouted the heartfelt but misleading senti- ment 'never again!' Alas, in this vale of tears there are always some who cry 'never again' and others who cry, or slyly whisper, 'A yes, just once again!' And it is the latter who attack the former, taking them un- awares. Did not Haig damn nearly lose us not only the first world war but the second too? Perhaps even the third?